Yes, I warned anybody who would listen, that Pres. Trump would finish off this planet and 5 days into he is guaranteeing that some of the dirtiest energy on the planet will be burnt (haha burned). Tar sands for God’s sake. What about leave it in the ground. Nah he wants to toss it up in the air. I am not saying I like McKibben, I do not. I mean on tactics. I think his analysis is right on.

On Pipelines, Donald Trump Looks Backward

By BILL McKIBBENJAN. 25, 2017

IF you’re searching for a lens to understand just how President Trump sees the world, his executive orders on Tuesday reviving the Keystone XL and expediting the Dakota Access pipelines provide a sharply focused glimpse. In a word, he looks backward at all times. We’re beginning to get a better sense of what he means by “again” in “Make America Great Again.”

On questions of jobs and industry, he looks back at least to the 1950s. If something is big and made of steel, then it’s great. Like some Soviet Realist painter, Mr. Trump seems to have an image stuck in his head of brawny men building a nation. Those are real jobs, and all the other innovation in the economy doesn’t amount to much.

In fact (a phrase that suddenly seems politically charged) that’s not how economies work any more: If something is big and steel, it’s probably going to be run by robots. If the Keystone XL Pipeline is ever completed, for instance, it will employ about 35 full-time workers, relying for its operation on a vast network of sensors, drones and the like. The number of workers in our labor-intensive solar industry alone now surpasses those employed extracting coal, gas and oil combined

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Just imagine what he can do in 1,400 days. Go there and read. More next week.

I was going to write something positive today. You know Sunday is Mothers Day. Tomorrow is National Solar Power Day. But, today the press announced that a forest fire had started south of the main town in the tar sands of Alberta AND that if it got into the tar sands themselves it could burn forever. Forever! 80,000 people have been evacuated on a single road north and who knows where they will seek shelter.

Residents evacuated as fires threaten Canada oil sands town

A raging wildfire emptied Canada’s main oil sands city, destroying entire neighborhoods of Fort McMurray, Alberta, where officials warned Wednesday that all efforts to suppress the fire have failed.

About 88,000 residents successfully evacuated as flames moved into the city surrounded by wilderness in the heart of Canada’s oil sands. No injuries have been reported. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley said there is significant destruction and estimated 1,600 structures have been destroyed or damaged.

Unseasonably hot temperatures combined with dry conditions have transformed the boreal forest in much of Alberta into a tinder box. The wildfire threat ranged from very high to extreme in different areas.

So this is the end. Sorry. Bad use of a Doors lyric. But this is very troubling. Once the Cold in the world is removed it is very difficult to replace it. I do not do pictures by the way so you will have to go and look at them at the site below.

Greenland Glacier Loses Big Chunk of Ice (Photo)

Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier recently made headlines for its record-breakingly fast flow. Now, a new satellite image provides a visual of this process.

In a comparison between two images of the glacier, one taken May 9 and the other June 1, the loss of kilometers of ice from the calving front of the glacier is visible. The change is so significant that the after image almost looks like it has been “zoomed out” to make the glacier look smaller. But the views are the same. The missing ice simply slipped into the sea.

The Jakobshavn glacier is one of Greenland’s most prominent. It drains some 6.5 percent of the Greenland ice sheet area into the Ilulissat Icefjord in western Greenland, according to NASA. Researchers believe this glacier produced the iceberg that wrecked the Titanic. [Gallery: Greenland’s Melting Glaciers]

How Deadly Is Your Kilowatt? We Rank The Killer Energy Sources

Everyone’s heard of the carbon footprint of different energy sources, the largest footprint belonging to coal because every kWhr of energy produced emits about 900 grams of CO2. Wind and nuclear have the smallest carbon footprint with only 15 g emitted per kWhr, and that mainly from concrete production, construction, and mining of steel and uranium. Biomass is supposedly carbon neutral as it sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere before it liberates it again later, although production losses are significant depending upon the biomass. Carbon emissions and physical footprints are known as externalities and are those vague someone-has-to-pay-eventually kind of thing it’s hard to put a value on. Proposed carbon footprint taxes are in the range of $15 to $40/ton of CO2 emitted, but assigning a physical footprint cost depends on the region, ecosystem sensitivities and importance. A hundred-acre wetlands to be flooded by a new dam is worth more to the planet than a barren hundred-acre strip under a solar array in the Mojave (P. Bickel and R. Friedrich, 2005).

But an energy’s deathprint, as it is called, is rarely discussed. The deathprint is the number of people killed by one kind of energy or another per kWhr produced and, like the carbon footprint, coal is the worst and wind and nuclear are the best. According to the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Academy of Science and many health studies over the last decade (NAS 2010), the adverse impacts on health become a significant effect for fossil fuel and biofuel/biomass sources (see especially Brian Wang for an excellent synopsis). In fact, the WHO has called biomass burning in developing countries a major global health issue (WHO int). The table below lists the mortality rate of each energy source as deaths per trillion kWhrs produced. The numbers are a combination of actual direct deaths and epidemiological estimates, and are rounded to two significant figures.

I hate to say it but it couldn’t happen to a nicer company. For years they have been one of the least tolerant of companies. They resisted any thought of innovation. Stuck to burning coal and nuclear power plants long after it was fashionable. And snickered all the time like an evil teenager. They fought regulation until they were overwhelmed. Bad karma always comes to a bad end.

ComEd rate-hike issue delayed; customers keep switching

BY SANDRA GUY Business Reporter sguy@suntimes.com September 19, 2012 6:06PM

The Illinois Commerce Commission on Wednesday delayed until Oct. 3 reconsidering a Commonwealth Edison rate-hike request centered on how ComEd accounts for its pension assets.

he ICC previously approved a rate that ComEd claimed was inadequate, ruling that ComEd can’t earn a rate of return on a pension asset that isn’t fully funded.

The commission took up other issues at its meeting Wednesday in Springfield, and didn’t give a reason for the delay.

ComEd had proposed a decrease in its electricity rates totaling $40 million to $50 million, but because of the pension issue, the ICC decided May 29 to cut customers’ rates by four times that for a total of $168.6 million.

The method they are using here is preferable to simply drilling a well anywhere and trying to bury it in the ground. The oil in spent fields never will get out and there was plenty of pressure, so this at least seems safe.

Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.

SOURCE Indiana Gasification

Transporting CO2 to Gulf States Could Boost U.S. Oil Production by 20 Million Barrels a Year

ROCKPORT, Ind., June 22, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Indiana Gasification welcomed today’s Federal Register publication by the U.S. Department of Energy of an amended notice of intent (NOI) to include an approximately 440 mile CO2 pipeline in the environmental impact statement (EIS) required for DOE financial backing of IG’s state-of-the-art clean fuels facility.

The DOE publication marks the most recent regulatory development in support of the plant, which will be the cleanest coal-fired facility ever built in the United States. In the last two months, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management has filed a proposed clean air permit with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and issued a draft Clean Water Act permit.

In the Notice of Intent, the Department of Energy acknowledges that the proposed project with the CO2 pipeline qualifies for financing under the 2008 appropriations act providing authority for industrial gasification activities. Further, the DOE has determined that the project meets two goals of the Title XVII Loan Guarantee Program, encouraging the commercial use of new or significantly improved technology and achieving substantial environmental benefits.

Pilliga coal seam gas project an environmental disaster

The Pilliga Scrub is one of Australia’s bush icons. At over 500,000 hectares – two thirds the size of Belgium – it is the largest temperate woodland in eastern Australia.

It is one of 15 national biodiversity hotspots identified by the Federal Government, and is home to threatened species such as the Regent Honeyeater and the endemic Pilliga Mouse.

Now mining company Eastern Star Gas wants to turn the Pilliga into a massive industrial development zone.

Eastern Star has plans for a huge 1100 well coal seam gas development in the Pilliga. The destruction of the Pilliga is the first big step to seeing our natural forests and rural land covered with gas wells.

This gas field will fragment 85,000 hectares of forest, including a protected area, and this is just the beginning.

The Pilliga project also involves gas pipelines sited along environmentally-sensitive travelling stock routes and across prime agricultural land, against the wishes of local farmers. The associated export terminal at Newcastle will threaten the Kooragang RAMSAR wetland.

Allowing coal seam gas developments in the Pilliga threatens the Great Artesian Basin with the existing dozen-well project already discharging waste water into the Murray-Darling Basin.

Communities across Australia are worried about coal seam gas projects polluting their local water supplies with toxins and salt. If the Pilliga project is built, there’s no telling what the impacts on water in north west NSW will be. The Pilliga coal seam gas project is an environmental disaster waiting to happen.

What is a Transition Community?

The Transition Movement, promoting an action-based approach to (local) sustainability, has in the past four years grown to incorporate a large network of individual Transition Initiatives. Informed by ideas and values within environmental organizations, yet, in its practical organisation it is distinct from past models of sustainability by incorporating broad grassroots support in a diverse range of places within the framework of a coherent networking model.

While local sustainability has become a politically important goal, in practice neither top-down government nor grassroots community models have gained widespread uptake or success: the former have failed to connect with or involve a grassroots public; the latter generally have few resources and limited capacity.

The Transition Model, a non-governmental community-led model, advances an action-based approach. With its fast-growing network of Initiatives, the Transition Movement is akin to a non-profit franchise operation, combining the advantage of a centralized support base with the capacity and resources of a decentralized networking organization.

The Transition concept, co-founded by Rob Hopkins, who has a background in permaculture, builds upon a core thesis: that the modern industrial capitalist economic and social system, based upon cheap oil and resources, is unsustainable, making a major restructuring of economy and society imperative, and inevitable. Transition contends that citizens and communities need to act proactively and positively at the local scale, in a process of ‘Transition’ and ‘Powerdown’ to build localized and resilient communities in terms of food, energy, work and waste. The vision holds that decarbonized local communities will be resilient in their capacity to “hold together and maintain their ability to function in the face of change and shock from the outside.” Transition is modelled to be a self-organizing community-led model, for people to “act now and act collectively.”

I know. Barack Obama, Dick Durbin and every other person on this planet is in favor of this Clean Coal technology. But how advanced is it to use a process created in the late 1800s in 2011. The easy answer is it ain’t. Please call your representative to protest.

FutureGen Pipeline Issues

WBGZ Radio | Mar 18, 2011

The pipeline that’s going to carry carbon dioxide from one place to another as part of the FutureGen clean-coal project is the subject of a bill which has passed a Senate committee. The bill writes a process for Illinois to oversee the construction and operation of such a pipeline.

“This bill is patterned after what the Illinois Commerce Commission currently does with regard to petroleum pipelines, crude oil, water utility lines, and electric transmission lines,” said sponsoring State Sen. John Sullivan (D-Rushville). Opponents include farmers in Morgan County, where the pipeline would be built. They say the property owners who do want it are the ones who don’t live there. FutureGen would use a former Ameren plant in Meredosia to convert coal into carbon dioxide, which would be stored near Alexander. SB 1821 has passed the Senate Executive Committee.

Obama’s energy challenge is coal, not oil

45 percent of the nation’s electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants

By Howard Fineman

msnbc.com msnbc.com

updated 4/14/2010 10:09:22 AM ET 2010-04-14T14:09:22

ANALYSIS

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama touched off a new environmental skirmish with his decision to open vast new areas of the American coastline to offshore oil drilling. But as loud as that battle is going to get, it is nothing compared with the real energy war to come.

I speak, of course, of the Coal War.

Forget whatever else you hear about energy policy, the real fight — and the real political problem — this year in Congress will be how to deal with our nagging reliance on the most abundant component of our carbon-based patrimony.

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about offshore drilling, wind power, natural gas, and energy conservation … but the short-term drift of history still dictates a heavy reliance on the dirtiest and deadliest of all fuels: coal.

The big question in the energy bill — if there is one — is how and whether Congress will ask the American people to pay for the cost of controlling the environmental consequences of that reliance.

At its core, the president’s energy vision calls for switching our transportation system from oil to plug-in electricity. But 45 percent of all electricity in the country is still generated by coal-fired power plants. In other words, we run the real risk of merely replacing one polluting and increasingly scarce fuel, petroleum, with an abundant but even more environmentally troublesome one, coal.

An energy bill that, among other things, would tax pollution caused by burning fossil fuels was passed by the House last year. It’s gotten nowhere in the Senate. Obama’s drilling announcement was designed to get the Senate’s attention — and garner some Republican support.

But opening up offshore drilling prospects is politically, the easy part. I think the president can get that piece of the puzzle.

The hard part is going to be convincing senators from coal-producing and/or electricity-exporting states to go along with any sort of carbon tax.

States with power plants that generate electricity from coal read like a roster of presidential swing states. Among them: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri and North Carolina. And other states with major coal commitments include: Georgia, Arizona, Kentucky and Wyoming.

Getting 60 votes for some kind of carbon-pollution tax, even if it’s in the most attenuated “cap-and-trade” form, will be next to impossible.

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Go read the rest. It is pretty good. Everyone have a great weekend. More next week.